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Move over, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Here comes Xiaomi:
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal , Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi is looking to join the ranks of Apple, Samsung, and Huawei by developing its own smartphone chips. The report says the move is part of "aspirations to join the top tier" of smartphone manufacturers and an attempt to stand out from the slew of other OEMs.
For now, Xiaomi's processor is apparently called "Pinecone," and it will be released "within a month" according to the report. This might be talking about the processor of the Xiaomi Mi 6, which, if Xiaomi keeps to the usual yearly release cycle, should be out sometime in March. Xiaomi's chip design division isn't coming from nowhere—using a shell company called "Beijing Pinecone Electronics," Xiaomi paid $15 million to acquire mobile processor technology from Datang subsidiary Leadcore Technology Ltd.
Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:28PM
More like 7 actually but in this day and age virtually everyone in China speaks passable Mandarin, so they can actually talk to each other just fine. It's true many speak e.g. Cantonese at home instead, and have to consciously switch to Mandarin, maybe speak it with a touch of an accent, but the level of competency is nonetheless very high because Mandarin is used for all official business and has been for generations.
"but they seem to be able to write to each other (using the same written down characters)"
Mostly true.
"so if chinese language number ONE reads some chinese characters they vocalize it differently then if chinese language number TWO vocalizes the same characters ... "
Sure that can happen. The character for forest, for instance, is 3 trees iirc, and pronounced 'lin' (with a tone I forget) in mandarin but 'rin' (with a different tone I forget) in Cantonese. They're still pretty close (the tonal difference is bigger than the l-r alteration, and both are regular, so they have the character of an 'accent' - sort of.)
"now the insanity is ported into latin characters?"
It can be but pinyin is almost always used to write mandarin rather than something else. In fact, it's mostly used for *teaching* mandarin in my experience. Adult literature is printed exclusively in hanji (characters.)
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